Math Explosion

It is so amazing to me to watch a mind develop - on its own time, in its own way, with no external pressures. We are unschooling Samantha, partly because we believe people should be free to learn what they want when they want, partly because of her intense emotional needs, and partly because she really thrives on her own unschedule.

So just in the last month, since she turned 5, it's as if a switch flipped and math suddenly exploded into her mind. First, after finding a tape measurer with great excitement, she went around measuring everything in the house and designed a novel number line system to record her results - she wrote out a line of numbers like this:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Then for each thing she measured, she would draw a dot or a line on the number line to represent it. So if something was 24 cm, she would draw a line from the 2 to the 4. If something was 8 cm, she would draw a dot on the 8. She ended up with a really fascinating graphical distribution of measurements! What seemed like a brilliant flash of inspiration to me was just something obvious to her. I then suggested trying the more classical grid-style recording method, where you write down the name of the object you are measuring and record the measurement next to it - this was interesting for her as long as I did the writing and she did the measuring.

We play a lot of Monopoly, too. Samantha mostly enjoys setting up the game - counting out the money and buying those first few properties. She always likes to be the bank. :) She also has her own money box where she keeps her money and regularly sorts and counts it out, sparked by having her own business selling art prints.

Adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing are also starting to magically appear out of nowhere, with not a single formal lesson. She has a really intuitive understanding of these concepts, and plays with the ideas just for fun. Yesterday she randomly started trying to divide a group of 9 beanbag animals into groups of different sizes, seeing which numbers divided evenly and which didn't.

She is learning fractions from the variety of measuring cups and spoons that she uses in her food experiments, and is developing a sense of time using movies or TV shows as benchmarks. So she will often ask, "How many Totoros is it until we go trick-or-treating?" or "How many Kavita Patel's (her favorite cooking video clip) until we get to IKEA?" or "How many Zula Patrol's until Mommy gets back from tai chi?"

We have also been playing with a really fun brain games book where she has learned about arrays, tesselation, and advanced geometry with the same spirit of connection and cooperative challenge as when we are all doing a jigsaw puzzle together.

A friend said to me recently, "She's doing so great, why send her to school and mess it all up?"
Why indeed.